What happens when a lot of money — I mean, alot of money — is concentrated in a few hands?

The nation runs the risk of economic failure.

This short video says that more money is concentrated in fewer hands than we think.

Description from the maker, Politizane:

Infographics on the distribution of wealth in America, highlighting both the inequality and the difference between our perception of inequality and the actual numbers. The reality is often not what we think it is.

This is just one facet of the figures necessary for having rational discussions about tax reform, federal budget and deficit cutting, tax policy, and economic and monetary policy.

But it’s an ugly portrait, isn’t it? How much does it differ from the France of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette? How much does it differ from the going-to-hell-in-an-accelerating-handbasket U.S. of 1929? Wealth’s concentration in the hands of a tiny few literally crowds out hundreds of millions of Americans from the ability to successfully accumulate modest nest eggs.

There is no special agreement. Do you think all argeements are special?

There is just “AN AGREEMENT”. What it is?

If it is “pay you for work”, what are the terms?

Ed, do you actually enter into contracts this ignorantly? You don’t know what you need to do, what the other guys needs to do, what the terms and conditions may be, the consequences of success and the consequences of failure???

You haven’t a fog of a clue about a contract, right?

There were no terms, so your declaration of “unequal or equal” is utterly irrelevant. You are making up stories as you go along.

I explicitly stated that up front. It’s not a loophole you’ve found; it’s a condition you overlooked.

Just went back and checked. That isn’t true either. But, let’s give it to you. Work is work, an hour is an hour, just like a ten-pound bag of barley is a ten-pound bag of barley, or a gallon of pure water is a gallon of pure water.

The unavoidable conclusion is that liberals abhore the kind of creativity that reduces a day’s worth of labor into a fraction of a second. They cannot comprehend it, and it’s probably because they’re disgusted by it.

Liberalism is an ideology for a dead, distant-past age, before computer programming, puzzle solving, or anything of the like, back when grinding corn into flour was the most cerebral task a human mind could undertake, along with maybe clubbing papyrus reeds into something resembling paper.

As such, it simply cannot understand how a good idea might save work. Therefore, someone might very well put in fewer hours and end up earning — and deserving — vastly greater compensation.

It is a mindset evolved for 3000 BC, struggling to get along in 2000 AD. And failing at it.

Well THAT certainly isn’t true. Your hypothetical implicitly assumes that an hour worked by one worker results in equal progress toward the end objective compared to an hour worked by another. ANY other.

Correct. That’s one of the givens. In many assembly line jobs, that’s a truism.

I explicitly stated that up front. It’s not a loophole you’ve found; it’s a condition you overlooked.

If there is no agreement, then how did anyone decide to work or not? If a bunch of money was thrown into the center of the room and – according to you – it was a free-for-all, then what did you expect?

When I present it in simple terms, you look for all sorts of loopholes to defend the unjust outcome — but there are none.

Well THAT certainly isn’t true. Your hypothetical implicitly assumes that an hour worked by one worker results in equal progress toward the end objective compared to an hour worked by another. ANY other.

With a bit of decent respect paid to the concept of work, one immediately sees the obvious, that there’s a right way and a wrong way to do anything. Suppose your first worker, in that one hour before he quit, actually achieved the goal. Then the other eight (I think you meant to say nine, eight men and one woman) churned away at the project uselessly, and the woman, toward the end of the fifteenth hour she worked, realized that the first guy got it right. Given that, it would make all the sense in the world for the first guy to get all the money.

You seem to have a grudging disrespect against work that actually accomplishes something. If there really is a goal and the goal really does involve some difficulty, then the hours lose the quality of fungibility; it’s no longer like one half gallon of olive oil being the same as any other half gallon. People work hard, work lazily, work smart, work stupidly. Hard, smart work demands compensation. That is the incentive people have for being creative.

Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. So all this stuff about “rich” and “poor” is off topic. We’re talking strictly about income.

Should I even bother trying to get to the bottom of this slander, about me advocating for a wealth transfer from the poor to the rich? Or when you slandered me this way, were you talking purely about low-income versus high-income…

You never did bother to provide support for your slander. Where did I advocate for such a transfer?

There will always be some wealth inequality. The Rockefellers got a head start.

But if we take care of income inequality, and don’t use taxes to redistribute wealth from the poor and middle class to the very rich, wealth inequality will even out, to the benefit of all participants in the economy. There will be greater wealth overall, more millionaires, more billionaires, and less poverty.

Income inequality leads to injustice in many areas, poverty and festering problems in housing and communities. Even that out, a lot of other problems go away.

As the charts indicate, though most Americans are working smarter, harder and longer, they get paid less than they used to. The increases in wealth creation have been sent to the very wealthy, largely through our unjust tax system.

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